San Antonio Review

01/05/2026

“Maybe confidence is the calluses on your feet.”

In "At the Palau de Música," Ian Day () captures the beautiful chaos of travel, timing, and attention—missed tickets, shadows on mosaic walls, the percussive certainty of flamenco feet. This poem listens closely to confidence as something earned, embodied, and replayed long after the curtain falls.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where memory keeps the rhythm.

01/04/2026

“I am too soft to thrive without the pressure.”

In "At the Oceanogràfic in València," Ian Day turns an aquarium visit into a meditation on wonder, alienation, and the quiet wish to exist on one’s own terms. Surrounded by named belugas and captive spectacle, the speaker longs to be an undiscovered deep-sea creature—fragile, strange, and impossible to contain.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where longing dives below the surface.

12/31/2025

“The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.”

"All in a Day’s Work" explores the quiet violence of revision. A modern Winston Smith doesn’t torture truth, he edits it.

Bureaucratically. Invisibly. Painfully normal.

History gets rewritten in grayscale — one “correction” at a time.
This is Orwell for the AI age.

🖤 Wordplay with consequences.
🗃️ Design as dissent.

See more at sanantonioreview.org.

12/30/2025

“Our belovèd mothers went into the earth with no poem.”

In Burial, James Kangas writes with restraint and grace about loss, ritual, and the moment when words fail. Set against thawing ground and delayed burials, this poem honors grief not through ceremony or verse, but through silence—the truest offering when love is too deep to speak.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where absence carries its own meaning.

12/29/2025

“We need the Angry Christ.”

David E. Matthews doesn’t flinch.

This piece dares to ask: What good is faith if it forgets the poor? With scripture as backdrop and urgency in every line, this visual poem calls out the billionaire class, political theater, and spiritual emptiness behind economic cruelty.

🟥 A sermon. A protest. A reckoning.
🗣️ Art as scripture for the disillusioned.

12/29/2025

“Without their outrage, the baby might have unwrapped a foot-binding kit.”

In "Tabula Rasa," Jefferson Carter braids sharp humor with generational reflection, moving from Betty Friedan’s messy legacy to a toddler tottering in pink plastic heels. The poem asks what progress really looks like, how far feminism has carried us, and what we still hand down—knowingly or not—to those just beginning. Wry, unsettling, and deeply human.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where memory, critique, and laughter collide.

12/28/2025

Foolish spirits, fractured selves, and the ache of belonging.

In “‘Foolish Spirits’: The Multiple Otherings of Anima Fatua,” Jayne Marshall offers a luminous, searching reading of Anna Lidia Vega Serova’s novel—one that traces displacement across borders, languages, bodies, and identities. This review explores how multiplicity becomes both survival strategy and existential truth, asking what it means to live as “other” in a world that demands coherence. Thoughtful, compassionate, and deeply attuned to literature’s moral weight.

Read the full review at sanantonioreview.org — where criticism becomes a form of care.

12/23/2025

“After sunrise removes the water’s chill.”

In "Morning Swim," Alexander Pepple captures the quiet ritual of immersion — body, shoreline, labor, and light moving in shared rhythm. This poem drifts between solitude and community, industry and tide, reminding us how mornings remake both the swimmer and the shore.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where language moves like water.

12/23/2025

Mithra Awards and Seasons Greetings: Wrapping up 2025 [Sent with Free Plan]

Wrapping up 2025

12/22/2025

🌙 “A bedtime story for a world that refuses to rest.”

In "Doctors Have Found Man Who Never Sleeps," Alexander Pepple blends satire, science fiction, and sharp social critique to question productivity, exploitation, and the myth of conquering sleep. What begins as a strange news item spirals into a meditation on labor, capitalism, and the irreducible human need to dream. Wry, unsettling, and brilliantly imagined.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where speculation keeps us awake.

12/22/2025

Please join us in celebrating and wishing luck to our poetry nominees for the 2025 Pushcart Prize.

12/21/2025

🛣️ “All those roads. All those forks.”

In "If Only," Mark Michaels takes inventory of a life shaped by near-misses, wild chances, deep love, and long unraveling. This poem moves with brutal honesty through ambition, desire, disaster, and devotion—asking what was chosen, what was endured, and what can never be reclaimed. A reckoning with time, intimacy, and the quiet ache of hindsight.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where lived experience tells the truth.